Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy

Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology as First Philosophy

Ames, Roger T.

Hardcover

Series: Suny Chinese Philosophy and Culture

PhilosophyConfucianismGeneral Eastern Religions

ISBN10: 1438499531
ISBN13: 9781438499536
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Oct 1 2024
Pages: 389
Weight: 1.63
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Contrasts classical Greek ontology (the science of being in itself) with Confucian zoetology (the art of living).

In Living Chinese Philosophy, Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology (the science of being in itself) with classical Chinese zoetology (the art of living), which is made explicit in the Yijing易經or Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in being qua being or being per se (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind (eidos) of any particular thing, thus setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be this and not that. In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology. It also provides the interpretive context for the canonical texts by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or being, we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or life and create the neologism zoe-tology as the art of living (shengshenglun生生論). This cosmology begins from living (sheng生) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless becomings not things that are but events that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human beings and a process conception of what the author calls human becomings.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Ames, Roger T.

View All

Also in

General Eastern Religions

View All